WHITE PINE GROVES
A tiny brown wing brushed my cheek this morning, flitting madly
southeastward on the wings of the November gale. It was a belated
one of many that have scattered from the pine taps this autumn,
for it was the single wing of a white pine seed and the cone
harvest has been good. Ever since August the squirrels have known
this and the stripped spindles lie by the score under the big
pasture pines where these have left them after eating the seeds.
It seems much work for small pay for the squirrel. He must climb
venturesomely to the very tip of the slippery limb, gnaw the cone
from its hold, then run down the tree and gnaw it to pieces for
the tiny seeds within. So light are these seeds, wing and
all, that it takes twenty to thirty thousand of them to weigh
a pound and it is probably fortunate that squirrels do not live by
pine seed alone. However, the gnawing means as much to the
squirrel as the eating, for the squirrel's teeth grow constantly
and he must continually wear them off or he dies, stabbed by his
own incisors which grow in the arc of a circle. Yet the squirrel
is an adept at getting at the tiny, toothsome seed and he can
strip a cone of its scales far faster than I can, even if I use my
knife. He holds the cone stem end upward in his fore paws which
are so like hands, severs the base of the scale with his ivory
shears and has munched the two little seeds that cling under the
very bottom of the scale, almost before you can see him do it.
Certain wise naturalists assure us that the squirrel does not use
reason in this handling of the cone, merely acting automatically
by blind instinct. Yet he gets his results in the shortest time
and with the least effort. The highest reasoning could teach him
no more and if instinct is such a splendid short cut to the
solution of problems it is a pity that it is not added to our
common school course. The squirrel, they say, does it because he
and his ancestors have done it in the same way for untold
generations, the automatic impulse being born in him and bound to
appear at the right moment, just as his teeth grow without his own
volition. Yet there must have been a time when the first squirrel
sat up on a limb with his first pine cone in his paws. Did he
reason out the way to get those seeds or did he know instinctively?
And if so what is instinct in his case?
For all the squirrels got so many cones that in some places in the
woods the ground is fairly carpeted with the brown scales which
they severed, prompted by this clever whatever-it-is that is such
an excellent substitute for wisdom, there are plenty still left on
the trees where they dangle from the branch tips, their scales
gaping and the seeds for the most part gone. Left to themselves
they have been flying away ever since September, a few at a time
on dry, windy days when their single wings would scull them
farthest. One might impute instinct or whatever it is to the pine
tree too, she works so methodically for the preservation of her
species. A year ago last spring the mother pine put forth the
beginnings of those pine cones that now dangle brown and pitchy,
or drop to the ground, useless except as kindlings for my
campfire. Then they were wee golden-green buds of pistillate
flowers, set high on the uppermost branch tips that the pollen
from the tree's own staminate blooms might miss them in its flight
down the wind and thus avoid in breeding. If they miss fertilization
altogether they fall off. It is commonly said that the pines
produce a crop of cones once in five or seven years, which
is true in part, just as the statement that every seventh
wave at sea is larger than any of its preceding six is occasionally
borne out by the facts. I do not recall years in which the
pines have failed to put forth both staminate and pistillate
blossoms. Sometimes frost gets these and they fail to reproduce.
Sometimes a long rain will prevent the pollen from being
disseminated by the wind until its time is passed and again
there is a failure in cones. Only once in a while is the season
perfectly favorable, and then we get that seventh wave in pine
cones and the squirrels rejoice that they can file their teeth and
fill their cheek pouches at the same time. The years when there
are no cones at all sending forth their seeds in September are few
indeed. This year the harvest in my neighborhood has been an
excellent one.
The fertilized bloom soon ceases to be a little Christmas candle
on the tree top, closes its tiny scales over its growing seeds and
becomes a little green cone, still sitting upright on the upper
branch tip where it grew. By autumn it is an inch and a half long,
the short peduncle which attaches it to the branch has lengthened
and thickened, but is not able to hold it wholly erect, so much
has it gained in weight. At that season the young cone and its
fellows have tipped over horizontal or even becomes slightly
pendulous. Thus it remains through the winter, its scales pressed
close to its core and to one another, defending the tender seeds
from all cold and making a seemingly solid chunk of the whole.
Toward spring I have known squirrels to attack these young cones,
but rarely, and I am not sure whether it was because of the
pressure of hunger or whether some young squirrel's instinct to
sharpen his teeth on them made him a bit precocious. These
adolescent cones begin growing again very early in the spring.
Youth will have its way, and in this case it seems to seize on the
first sap that gets as far as the topmost branch tips, compelling
it to the nourishing of the young cones before it can go to the
making of new leaves or even of the crop of staminate and
pistillate blossoms for the ensuing summer. The cones add a
quarter of an inch to their length before the blossoms of that
year appear, and their weight sags them still more on the stem,
making them distinctly pendulous. By the last of August these
greedy feeders have not only ripened the seeds within the still
close-pressed scales, but have multiplied their own length by
four, being four to six inches long and hanging pretty nearly
straight down by their weight.
Their work is done then. Fifty or more scales has each cone, a
hundred or more seeds, if the fertilization has been perfect, are
ripe and ready to go forth and produce other pine trees. In early
September the sap begins to recede from these ripe cones, the
scales lose their green plumpness and begin to dry and curl back
toward the base of the cone. This gives the seed eating birds, the
siskins, the pine grosbeaks and especially the crossbills their
best opportunity and they eagerly pluck out such seeds as the
narrow openings will give them a chance at. Between these and the
squirrels the pine forests of the future are decimated before
their seeds have been planted. Nature provides bountifully for the
reproduction of all her favorites, yet far more bountifully in
some instances than in others. A thousand young birches spring
from seed, to one pine in our Massachusetts woods, and no wonder.
Each birch tree ripens a thousand seeds to one that comes to
maturity in the great cones of the pine. Yet there are compensations
for the pine tree. Barring axes and accidents it may live out
its third century and yearly give more and more comfort
and inspiration to mankind as it increases in dignity and beauty.
The birch may give comfort and inspiration too through its grace
and beauty, but it is lucky if it lasts out a score of years.
It is often a surprise to me to see how far a seed will fly with
but one wing. The air currents set it spinning the moment it
leaves its parent tree making of it at once a tiny gyroscope with
a single blade of a propeller. Its gyroscopic quality steadies it
and the whirl of its propeller tends always to lift its weight.
Hence with a downward current it falls with a less velocity than
the wind which whirls it, in a level breeze it often holds its
own, while in the upward slanting streams of air which flow so
often along and away from the earth's surface it rises easily. The
stronger the wind the more the whirl of that tiny propeller tends
to keep it in air and with a good September gale thrashing seed
out of its cones a pine tree may be planting its kind for miles to
leeward. The seed that brushed my cheek this morning made no such
offing. Caught in a back eddy it whirled round a sunny glade for a
moment, then in a sudden lull spun directly downward to the grass.
There again its shape favored it. The first grass spear stopped
its spinning and it dived plummet-like out of sight, the thin
propeller becoming a tail that kept it head downward while it
slipped most cannily to the very mould. There I found it, still in
such a position that every movement, every pressure, would carry
it dawn out of sight of all seed eating creatures where it might
rest and ripen till spring when it would be ready to germinate.
Searching the pine grove and the scrubby country that outlies it,
I found all stages of pine growth, from the gnarled patriarch four
feet in diameter at the butt to the germinating seedling. The
patriarch is nearly a hundred feet tall, and though I know many
pines of his height, I have found none of quite his diameter, and
I am very sure none of his age, hereabouts. His age I can but
guess, yet I know that fifty years ago he was as large as he is
now. Indeed, he had more wood in him, for his lower limbs that
then were green and flourishing and six to eight inches in
diameter have since decayed and fallen away. Recently a pine was
felled in Pennsylvania which was 155 feet tall and 42 inches
through at 4 feet 6 inches from the ground. This tree was 351
years old. I have reason to believe my patriarch is as old as that
one. His height is not so great, but he has three trunks instead
of one, springing from that gnarled butt at a number of feet above
the ground: There are occasional trees like this one still
standing in eastern Massachusetts. They have seen their children
and grandchildren grow to marketable size and fall before the
woodchopper's axe. They have seen one or two generations of
hardwood grow between these cuttings, yet they still are allowed
to remain. In cutting off wood it used to be the custom of our
forefathers to leave here and there a particularly gnarled and
difficult pine that the seed might furnish a growth for succeeding
generations. Hence these occasional trees. I may be wrong, but I
have an idea that my patriarch was growing right where he stands,
a young and vigorous sapling, when quaint old Josselyn wrote about
those two voyages to New England in the early years of the
seventeenth century.
Josselyn gives us to understand that the wood of the white pine is
that mentioned in the Scriptures as gopher wood out of which Noah
built the ark. Certainly if the white pine of Josselyn's day was
abundant in the neighborhood of Ararat in Noah's time he could
have done no better. The wood is light, soft, close and straight
grained. You may search the world for one more easily worked or
more generally satisfactory. Indeed the last half-century has seen
the good white pine of the world pretty nearly used up, certainly
all the best of it, for woodworking purposes. Fifty years ago it
was the cheapest New England wood, today it is the highest-priced,
and the old-time clear pine, free from knots and sapwood is almost
impossible to obtain at any price. For all the forestry we can
bring into play it will take more than three centuries to grow for
us such trees as were common in Maine and New Hampshire a century
ago. In 1832 white pines were not rare in Maine six feet in
diameter and 240 feet high. In 1736 near the Merrimac River above
Dunstable in New Hampshire a pine was cut, straight and sound and
having a diameter at the butt of 7 feet 8 inches. Half a thousand
years were none too many in which to grow such a pine as that.
Could a man have a few of these on his farm anywhere in New
England today they would be worth more than any other crop the
centuries could have raised for him.
The youngest pine seedlings hide so securely in the pasture grass
and under the low bushes that rarely does one notice them during
the first summer's growth. By the end of that time they are
singularly, to my mind, like fairy palm trees, planted in the
gardens where the little folk stroll on midsummer nights. Their
single stem and the spreading whorl of leaves at the summit of it
are in about the same proportion as those of a palmetto whose
great leaves have been tossed and shredded by the trade winds.
That so tiny a twig could become, in the passage of centuries
even, a 200-foot tree seems difficult to believe. It looks no more
likely than that the "ground-pine" which is taller than the
seedling and fully as sturdy should some day be 200 feet tall. Yet
the ground-pine may grow from its creeping rootstock for a
thousand years in the shade of one grove and never be over a foot
tall. Thus easily may we be deceived by small beginnings. No palm
ever rivalled a full-grown pine in height and girth, yet a palm
comes out of the ground as great in diameter of trunk and with as
abundant a leafage as it will ever have.
Watching seedling pines grow year by year it is difficult to see
how the great, clean trunked, old-time pines that towered over two
hundred feet tall and were from four to six feet in diameter came
about. The free growing pasture pine makes a round headed shrub,
for the first ten years or so of its life, with abundant long
limbs, and is clad in profuse foliage from top to bottom. Even as
decades pass its limbs still remain numerous and though there is
abundant wood in the half century old pasture pine it is of little
use for lumber, for the limbs, young and old, have filled its
trunk with knots. Where our present day trees have seeded in
thickly and uniformly over considerable space it is different.
Then as the trees grow old they grow taller, each struggling to
outdo its neighbors and get more light and air. Lower limbs decay
in time and in the progress of forty or fifty years we get a
"second growth" pine which is fairly limbless for a height of
forty or fifty feet. Give the trees another half century if you
will. I know many groves that have had that and still their
trunks, though fairly bare, show the knots where the limbs have
been and produce anything but clear lumber. It may be that by
giving these century-old groves another century or two we should
have something like the old perfect boles that our great
grandfathers got out of the Maine woods, but I am not sure about
it. I see no promise of it in the conditions under which pines
grow today. Even my patriarch, though he has, I am very sure,
sufficient years to his credit would cut up into only a medium
quality of box boards; there is no clear lumber in him.
To produce the wonder trees of the early half of the nineteenth
century the tiny seeds must have rooted plentifully in rich soil,
the trees must have grown so close together as to steadily and
persistently crowd out the weaker and shorter, and in the passing
of two, three or four centuries we had remaining the magnificent
specimens, towering two hundred or more feet in the air, their
trunks without limb or knot for more than half that distance. Such
conditions may account for these enormous trees, yet I am inclined
to think that they do not. I am inclined to the belief that in
these giant pines we had a variety of Pinus strobus which was very
closely allied to our smaller trees, but which was not the same,
just as the Sequoia gigantea of the higher Sierras is a gigantic
variety of redwood, closely allied to but not the same as the
Sequoia sempervirens, which flourishes nearer the coast and in the
lower levels. That would easily explain why our pines, which we
call "second growth," show little tendency to become such majestic
or so long lived trees as the giants of a century and more in age.
It is doubtful if any of the old time mighty ones remain in any
remotest corner of our forests. It is a pity, too, for it is
probable that in destroying the last one we destroyed a variety of
pine that was far nobler than any left.